"The rain set early in to-night, The sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, And did its worst to vex the lake, I listened with heart fit to break. When glided in Porphyria."
There, in five lines, is the scene and the mood, and in the sixth line Porphyria may enter. Take a middle-period poem, _A Serenade at the Villa_, for an instance of more deliberate description, flashed by the same fiery art:--
"That was I, you heard last night When there rose no moon at all, Nor, to pierce the strained and tight Tent of heaven, a planet small: Life was dead and so was light.
Not a twinkle from the fly, Not a glimmer from the worm. When the crickets stopped their cry, When the owls forebore a term, You heard music; that was I.
Earth turned in her sleep with pain, Sultrily suspired for proof: _In at heaven and out again, Lightning!--where it broke the roof, Bloodlike, some few drops of rain_.
What they could my words expressed, O my love, my all, my one! Singing helped the verses best, And when singing's best was done, To my lute I left the rest.
So wore night; the East was gray, White the broad-faced hemlock flowers; There would be another day; Ere its first of heavy hours Found me, I had passed away."
This tells enough to be an entire poem. It is not a description of the night and the lover: we are made to see them. The lines I have italicised are of the school of Dante or of Rembrandt. Their vividness overwhelms. In the latest poems, as in _Ivân Ivânovitch_ or _Ned Bratts_, we find the same swift sureness of touch. It is only natural that most of Browning's finest landscapes are Italian.[11]
As a humorist in poetry, Browning takes rank with our greatest. His humour, like most of his qualities, is peculiar to himself, though no doubt Carlyle had something of it. It is of wide capacity, and ranges from the effervescence of pure fun and freak to that salt and briny laughter whose taste is bitterer than tears. Its full extent will be seen by comparing _The Pied Piper of Hamelin_ with _Confessions_, or in the contrast of the two parts of _Holy-Cross Day_. We find the simplest form of humour, the jolly laughter of an unaffected nature, the effervescence of a sparkling and overflowing brain, in such poems as _Up at a Villa--Down in the City_, or _Pacchiarotto_, or _Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis_. _Fra Lippo Lippi_ leans to this category, though it is infused with biting wit and stinging irony; for it is first and foremost the bubbling-up of a restless and irrepressibly comic nature, the born Bohemian compressed but not contained by the rough rope-girdle of the monk. He is Browning's finest figure of comedy. _Ned Bratts_ is another admirable creation of true humour, tinged with the grotesque. In _A Lovers' Quarrel_ and _Dîs aliter Visum_, humour refines into passion. In _Bishop Blougram_ it condenses into wit. The poem has a well-bred irony; in _A Soul's Tragedy_ irony smiles and stings; in _Mr. Sludge, the Medium_, it stabs with a thirsty point. In _Caliban upon Setebos_ we have the pure grotesque, an essentially noble variety of art, admitting of the utmost refinement of workmanship. The _Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister_ attains a new effect of grotesque: it is the comic tragedy of vituperative malevolence. _Holy-Cross Day_ heightens the grotesque with pity, indignation and solemnity: _The Heretic's Tragedy_ raises it to sublimity. Browning's satire is equally keen and kindly. It never condescends to raise laughter at infirmity, or at mere absurdities of manners; it respects human nature, but it convicts falsity by the revealing intensity of its illumination. Of cynicism, of the wit that preys upon carrion, there is less than nothing.